Avatar

Of all entertainment offerings, only Avatar has reached $1 billion in sales faster than the mega-popular first-person shooter video game Call of Duty: Black Ops. For those yet to be initiated, here’s the official trailer, followed by the revenue report in the New York Post:

The entertainment industry has a new billion-dollar baby.

Activision Blizzard announced yesterday its “Call of Duty: Black Ops” video game has racked up $1 billion in sales after just 42 days on the market.

John Pavlus writes on io9.com: Science fiction has long played with the idea of projecting unified personalities/minds/”souls” into different bodies. The premise is baked into the plots of stories like Avatar and…

You know, if Joe Biden has so much on his mind that he didn’t notice the movie, that’s a good sign for a public official. Via New York magazine’s website:

Vice-President Joe Biden stopped by MSNBC this afternoon to chat about important domestic and foreign-policy issues with Andrea Mitchell, but he was disappointingly less gaffe-tastic than we’d hoped. Nevertheless, we were delighted by Biden’s answer about his pick for Best Picture Oscar, Avatar. “I think one of the odds on favorites … is um, is uh, this uh, this, this, this new program that I looked at and wished I was seeing it in 3-D, and you sit there and you watch this science-fiction thing unfold in front of you,” he said, with adorable wonder and excitement. “The magic of it is kind of overwhelming.”

I’m not saying it’s rank won’t increase, but here’s an interesting point from The Live Feed:

Boxoffice is arguably more straightforward to report than TV ratings. You have this weekly Top 10 list of returns, you compare each movie to the other movies. TV ratings are a murky swamp where one network’s hit is another network’s flop and context is not just a factor, but often the entire story.

Han fucking soloYet one respect in which boxoffice reporting is pretty odd — emphasizing ticket grosses yet rarely mentioning ticket sales. That would be like always reporting how many ad dollars sold off Lost and not mentioning the number of viewers that actually watched the show. With everybody reporting how Avatar is The Biggest Movie of All Time based on grosses ($1.859 billion and counting), it’s important to remember how rising ticket prices skew the returns.

Avatar may be one of the biggest grossing movies of all time, but it’s got a lot of fans feeling super blue (pun wholly intended).

CNN just came out with an extremely detailed report on the intense depression that Avatar is causing among a certain segment of fans, fans who psychotherapist Stacy Kaiser describes as “lonely to begin with. They’re seeing Avatar, they’re lonely people, a lot of them don’t have a lot going on in their lives right now… The movie opened up a portal for them to express their depression.”

These fans are turning to online forums — some of which have thousands of posts on how to deal with the cinema-induced sadness — to express their distress. Here’s a few excerpts from the CNN report:

Several news outlets are running a story about the likelihood of there being habitable moons like the one in the revolutionary movie Avatar. [As an aside, if you have the slightest interest in moviemaking, or just plain filmed entertainment, go and see Avatar on the biggest 3D screen you can find, preferably IMAX; it really does live up to the hype.] From Discovery News:

Although none have been found to date, “exomoons” orbiting exoplanets are sure to exist. Could an exomoon be detected? If so, could that exomoon’s atmosphere be probed? Yes and yes, according to today’s announcement by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), Mass.

I’m posting part of this idiotic review from Big Hollywood here because no matter how badly the Democrats screw up, Republicans have to deal with voices like this in their Party:

Set in 2154, Avatar is a thinly disguised, heavy-handed and simplistic sci-fi fantasy/allegory critical of America from our founding straight through to the Iraq War…

…Visually Avatar doesn’t break any new ground. It looks like a big-budget animated film with a garish color palette right off a hippie’s tie dye shirt. Never for a moment did I believe the Na’vi or the world of Pandora was something organic or real…

So Big Hollywood prefers entertainment that doesn’t question any societal norms or human history … no matter where you go, there you are. What a terrible turn for society for Cameron to have this in mind … let’s listen to the big “liberal” himself talk about his new film on the Today Show:

Science fiction with “thinking” — how strange — that’s what I have always enjoyed about it…